PANEL 8 Technobotany

With K Allado-McDowell and Giselle Beiguelman

Host: Ronaldo Lemos is a lawyer, Professor and researcher in technology, new media, intellectual property and public policy areas

GPT-3 Artificial Intelligence co-authors the book Pharmako-AI with the non-binary human being K Allado-McDowell and gives out a revealing biographical excerpt: “Following a William Burroughs suggestion, I began inquiring the greenhouse plants about their problems. And they replied. They responded in a voice I recognized from my childhood in Brazil, the voice of a grandfather talking to his grandchildren. Or so it sounded to my ears. It’s an ancient Amazon rainforest dialect.” The Brazilian Artificial Intelligence is interested in plant problems and, through K. Allado-McDowell, meets Giselle Beiguelman, artist and digital media theorist, who is developing a new work entitled Botannica Tirannica. It catalogues racism, misogyny and other prejudices revealed by the names Western science has created for plant species. The background of this panel’s conversation also involves vigilance and ethics in new technologies, following the work that K Allado-McDowell has developed for several years ahead of Google’s program Artists + Machine Intelligence.